


The making of a pirate

by deadlegato



Category: Talespin (Cartoon)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-08
Updated: 2020-03-08
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:20:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23071585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deadlegato/pseuds/deadlegato
Summary: Historical fiction centered on a young Don Karnage as the world changes around him.
Kudos: 6





	The making of a pirate

Introduction: This story uses the most commonly accepted years that Talespin takes place in 1937-1938, and that canonically Baloo is 35 and Don Karnage is at a minimum of 32 (Possibly slightly older). These characters would have seen the world change significantly during their lives. 

~1918~

A teenage red wolf stood blank-eyed and bare foot at the edge of a hastily dug pit. Inside the pit were the burning shapes of bodies wrapped in shrouds. The people of the village were trying to burn away the disease that had descended on the world just as the end of the Great War had been in sight. Somewhere in the mass of bodies were the wrapped forms of his father and four younger sisters. He was caked in ashes and smoke dust, broken only by patterns of tears under his eyes. 

A ragged female fox approached him. She didn’t dare get any closer than a few feet away. “Desiderio, this is no place for you. Go home to your mother,” she called.

The only people on the streets were either hustling around as if the devil were on their tails or dragging shrouded bodies towards the pit. The sounds of coughing and weeping had replaced the bright conversation of the former marketplace. The smoke from the fire was choking, on top of the sickness taking away the breaths of the ill. 

Desiderio’s house was the biggest and most elaborate in the village, signifying their position as the wealthiest family in the area. It also felt like the emptiest house in the village, now that the multitude of rooms were emptied of the sound of his sister’s voices. None of that wealth or privilege has stopped the sickness from coming in. As the only one in the family who had been spared falling severely ill, he had been the one to find each of the bodies after they had gone cold and wrap them in dirty sheets for collection in the streets. The wealthiest family in the area, and their bodies were still carried away like trash. 

As the front door creaked open, the last of the life he had previously known was violently ripped away. For inside the main entryway, unable to deal with the loss of her husband and daughters, hung his mother’s lifeless body from a rope. He collapsed to his knees, feeling the pain of the impact of the hard floors on his body, unable to take his eyes off his mother swinging slightly back and forth. 

He could not remember how long he knelt on the floor. He had no motivation to leave that spot. He just wanted to stay there until he also died. It might have been minutes; it might have been days. His vigil was only broken when a rough man’s hand had reached out, gripped his arm, and pulled him away. 

The man was a tall, thickly built grey wolf. He was dressed smartly in a captain’s outfit, complete with a patch over one eye and one pierced ear. “Do not look, child. Your mother isn’t there anymore.” He slightly stooped down, so that he was eye level with the teenager. “My name is Don Karnage. Your father was my greatest friend growing up, and even though you’ve never met me before, I am your godfather. I came as quickly as I could when your father wrote to me to say the sickness was coming and he hoped I could take you children away from here. I am very sorry. If I had been faster, I might have been able to prevent this.” 

There was a group of raggedly dressed men with the captain. Young Desiderio had vaguely heard of pirates but hadn’t thought very much of them prior to that time. He would not fully understand the nature of the senior Karnage’s crew until later.

The senior Karnage turned to the men. “Cover your faces to avoid breathing the miasma,” he said in English. Desiderio did not speak English yet, and did not understand what was being ordered. “Take everything of value back to the ship, bury the mother, and burn what’s left of the house,” he ordered.

“What are you going to do with the boy?” one of the crew asked. 

The man, who Desiderio would eventually come to think of as the senior Don Karnage, tightened his grip on the boy’s shoulder. “I told you, we are taking everything of value back to the ship. The boy is young, strong, and has survived the sickness without being touched. He will be of use to us.” Then speaking the native language again, the senior Karnage turned back to the teenager. “You’re going to come with us. When I became your godfather, I promised I would take care of you if anything happened to your parents. What honor has a man who does not keep his promises?”

Desiderio, the shy child younger Karnage had once been, went to the pirate’s ship speaking no English, and with the crew outside of the senior Don Karnage speaking exceptionally little of his own language. The fact that every member of the crew spoke English with a slightly different accent would not be helpful. He was a quick learner and picked up enough isolated words to make some effort at communication by the first time he laid eyes on the volcano dominating Pirate Island. He had also learned to perform quite a few tasks simply by watching others doing them. The senior Karnage constantly drilled into the child that everyone on a ship had to carry their own weight, and anyone who couldn’t would be marooned or thrown to the sharks. That was motivation enough to pick up skills as quickly as he could. Being born of privilege, he had never truly worked in his young life. He worked his fingers to bleeding until the calluses started to build up on his hands. 

The crew had, to the senior Karnage’s surprise, taken quite a shine to his ward. They were constantly holding up objects and repeating the English words that matched the objects for him. Again, though, each of their unique accents meant that figuring out exactly which name for the word was correct confusing. It was like watching them all dote over a precocious toddler just learning to speak. 

The first time they arrived inside Pirate Island, the senior Karnage had pulled Desiderio over to see a massive airship that was almost complete. There was a line of shiny new military planes lined up within the cavernous hidden base as well. “I am a privateer,” he explained. “I am authorized by our government to raid the ships of our enemies as an act of war. With their support, I have been working on this, my magnum opus, to allow me to raid the planes of our enemies as well,” he explained. “I intend to call it the Iron Vulture when it is finished. You have met my crew that takes to the sea, but you have not yet met my crew that dominates the air. I have no stomach for the air, which is where you come in. When you come of age, you will become the leader of my air pirates. At that time, you will take my name, becoming the next Don Karnage.” 

Thus began the intensive training. The flying lessons were hard enough. He had never seen a plane up close before, and now he was thrown into one, being forced to learn the complicated controls from a man who spoke only English when he could barely stumble through simple words for food and daily necessities. 

The captain’s lessons were even harder. He learned the trust and compassion were emotions for fools. He learned many other things about hardening his heart against the world. “There is a saying among the rabbit people that sums up the mind you must always have as a pirate,” the senior Karnage explained. “All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and when they catch you, they will kill you... but first they must catch you. Your enemies must only get lucky once. You must always be lucky.” 

Not long after the teenager’s arrival came the first moment of the pirate’s luck giving out. The war ended, and a letter came from their government leaders. The senior Karnage gathered the crew, both his air and sea pirates, and presented the letter to them. The meeting was held deep in the base in the dead of the night, leaving out the government-employed aviation instructors and any of the builders more associated with the government than the pirates. As most of the crew could not read, he read it aloud for them.

“The cessation of war activities means the cessation in our need for privateers. Your options are to join our navy and air force or return to civilian merchant life. We demand that you give the location of the secret base you have been building, and hand over all the ships and planes to our military. If you refuse, you will be considered traitors to be hung on sight.” 

He lowered the paper and shook his head. “I knew that hiding the location of our activities would be to our advantage. It gives us the opportunity to take the third option, but as this brand us all traitors… well, if we chose this, we can never go home. So, I ask all of you, what will we do? Will we return, or will we fight to keep what is rightfully ours?”

After hours of whispered debate, the unanimous decision was returned. We are pirates, and we will fight. That night, anyone they felt was more loyal to the government than to the captain had their throats cut in their sleep. That was the first night Desiderio was forced to bring a blade to anyone’s throat. While he had seen so much death in his young life already, he had not before seen blood spilled. He didn’t know that a single man could have so much blood in him. Outside of the dead man’s bed chamber, the young Desiderio vomited and wept. 

He was only fourteen.

Things after that became so much harder, and the stress began to take a physical and mental toll on their captain. Overnight, he had gone from a respected privateer to a declared traitor with a price hanging over his head. He tried to hide it from the crew but feeling betrayed and back stabbed by his government had affected him. He became colder with every passing year. He started killing more of his victims. He became abusive towards the crew, that he had formerly held and treated like his beloved children. 

His godchild took a disproportionate piece of his wrath. After becoming enraged one day the senior Karnage had sliced deep into the boy’s ear with a knife, threatening to cut his entire ear off, until the crew had stepped in to block his attack. Any time he saw the boy make a mistake, stumble, or just do anything that irrationally enraged him he would force the child to strip down and hold the walls while he beat on the boy’s back with a whip. It frequently took the intervention of the rest of the crew to protect the teenager from his mentor’s rage. What option did he have but to take it? His entire family was gone, and he was one of the traitors. Leaving was not an option. 

The senior Karnage, however, was growing weaker in his old age far faster than Desiderio was growing stronger. Perhaps it is true that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. The gratitude the teenager had once felt to the captain for taking him in had entirely evaporated, replaced only by tolerance for the man because he was still too young to have the strength to replace him. Two years had passed since the first time he had killed, and every time he killed after that, he felt a little bit less. Eventually, as he kicked a body off a plane so that it toppled into the choppy ocean waters below, he felt nothing. Only the feeling or rage towards the captain and a desire to protect the crew, his only family, from the captain’s wrath kept him from falling completely numb. 

As the captain’s violence increased, the size of the crew began to decrease. Eventually, the sea wing of their unit was almost entirely gone, replaced by orphaned teenagers or homeless delinquents they had picked up on their various travels. These new recruits did not want to sail, they wanted to fly. Desiderio personally taught most of them to fly, as there weren’t very many flight instructors left willing to work with them after word broke of the slaughter of the previous ones. 

As more and more of the senior Karnage’s crew was lost, those loyal instead to the younger Karnage increased. It was also around that time that the younger Karnage started to develop the personality he would become known for as an adult. It started as a way to entertain the traumatized younger members, and as more and more of the crew came to practically worship him, his ego started to grow with his act. 

When Desiderio was nineteen, the senior Karnage read an article about Cape Suzette building cliff guns specifically keep out pirates. He was enraged. How dare they build such an affront to him? He organized a raid intending to attack before the cliff guns were finished.

This would be his last miscalculation, and the first of many times the Iron Vulture would take a beating from the cliff guns. The military installation had been finished sooner than expected. Without doing enough research to realize this, he had tried to charge the protected cove, using what was left of his sea crew to boldly leave the way and asking the younger air pirates to hang back as support.

The cliff guns ripped a hole in his ship that sent it plummeting to the bottom of the sea. The following cover fire was too heavy for the air pirates to make any attempt at rescue. They could only watch the ship go down with the last of the old crew and their captain from a distance. Loudly, the younger Karnage cursed Cape Suzette for killing his mentor and vowed to avenge him. Internally, he thanked them for setting him free from the abuse and paving way for his rise to proper captain. It was also on that day that he washed away his former name, and never spoke of himself by it again until the day he would also hand the Karnage name to the next generation. 

Years continued to march by. Eventually, it seemed that everyone except the pirate now known as Don Karnage had forgotten there had been a previous Don Karnage. This only intensified his “ham” personality and lust to do something big enough to leave his name in history, as he had watched his mentor’s legacy turn to dust.

He watched the beginning of prohibition, and the giving of the vote to women in the United States. His ability to speak Italian and Spanish on top of English made it easy for him to work with the mob to take commissions moving large amount of alcohol on the Vulture, to fill in the gaps in income when pirating wasn’t as successful as he would like. Shortly before the existence of Higher for Hire started to complicate his life, he saw the end of prohibition. (Which, unfortunately, did take away a chunk of their income.) 

He saw penicillin come into existence, and saw it save many from diseases that had killed previous friends and crew. He woke up the morning after the stock market crash to news stories of bankers throwing themselves from the buildings of Wall Street. He plundered shipments of food during the dust bowl, and saw his profits grow at the expensive of price gouging desperate, hungry people. The senior Karnage had successfully beat the ability to feel regret or guilt for his actions out of him many years ago. 

He remembered the time his crew disguised themselves so that they could sneak into a theater to see the Jazz Singer, amazed at the way the sound and the picture flowed together. He could remember a time before radio broadcast programs, and he started to feel old when younger crew members would act as though it had always existed. 

He saw the rise of the new deal, the rise of the Thembrian state, and the rise of the fascist government of the Hund nation. When the Hindenburg exploded, he told his crew he was grateful that the Vulture was not a zeppelin. Sometimes, he would think about how he likely would have died a forgotten orphan had the senior Karnage not stepped in, and the pain he had endured would almost seem forgivable. 


End file.
